After CNBC reported Friday that Microsoft (MSFT) offered to acquire Salesforce (CRM) for $55B or $83 per share, Piper Jaffray analyst Katherine Egbert says the deal "makes a lot of sense." Such a deal would immediately make Microsoft a leader in enterprise cloud computing, Egbert tells investors in a research note. The combination would also make a new competitor to Oracle (ORCL) and SAP (SAP), the analyst adds. She keeps an Overweight rating on Microsoft with a $53 price target. Egbert models a takeout price for Salesforce near $85. The stock closed Friday at $75.01.

Microsoft's Activision is dropping team entry fees for its professional Call of Duty League, and will return prior collected fees, as the esports industry faces profit challenges, Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio reports. A lawsuit this year from a former owner identified the fees as $27.5M per franchise. Activision is also offering the teams two-year minimum revenue guarantees, according to the report. Reference Link

Oracle Corporation Japan "announced that it plans to invest more than $8B over the next 10 years to meet the growing demand for cloud computing and AI infrastructure in Japan. The investment will grow Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's footprint across Japan. In addition, to help customers and partners address the digital sovereignty requirements in Japan, Oracle will significantly expand its operations and support engineering teams with Japan-based personnel. Oracle plans to increase local customer support of its public cloud regions in Tokyo and Osaka and its local operations teams for Oracle Alloy and OCI Dedicated Region. This will enable governments and businesses across Japan to continue to move their mission-critical workloads to the Oracle Cloud and embrace sovereign AI solutions."

Microsoft's (MSFT) Rare said that its 2018 video game "Sea of Thieves," has achieved 40M players across Xbox, Windows 10 and Steam so far. The Fly notes that the game is set to release on PlayStation 5 (SONY) on April 30. Reference Link

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Morgan Stanley notes that Salesforce (CRM) management has advised investors that strategic M&A would be coming back into the company's toolkit at some point and recent press speculation about the company being in advanced talks to buy Informatica (INFA) suggests the company "may be ready to break the ice." While any significant M&A brings execution risks and "increased angst from investors still harboring memories of prior expensive deals," the analyst says a rumored transaction with Informatica, if it were to be confirmed and the deal were to be struck around a $12B enterprise value, looks to meet Salesforce's "criteria for responsible M&A." The firm, which sees potential for a complementary expansion that further buttresses the capabilities of Mulesoft and Data Cloud, has an Overweight rating and $350 price target on Salesforce shares.